Hands on: Bose SoundTouch 20

Looking for a wireless multi-room audio solution for your home? Bose has something you should consider

Streaming your tunes over a Bluetooth speaker is all the rage these days, but if you’re looking for a multi-room streaming audio solution, your options aren’t that many. There’s the elephant in the room – Sonos, which started the wireless multi-room revolution many years ago and has been the standout success story in this segment, though you’ll still have to look for a way to bring it in from abroad. Sonos today has a competitor – a real one, at that – in the form of the Bose SoundTouch range. With their launch, Bose claims it has cracked the one element that was missing from multi-room systems, that of effortless simplicity. We took the SoundTouch 20 for a spin to see if it delivers on that claim without sacrificing sonic punch.

Pulling the hefty SoundTouch 20 out of the packaging reveals a product that speaks an attractive though somewhat understated design ethos, one that is stylish enough to blend into home or boardroom. The front face is clad with a black fabric that covers the speakers with a pleasing OLED digital display cut through the center. But it’s the top edge that we were most interested in, where a set of rubber keys, numbered 1 to 6, hold the key to a rather different approach to controlling the speaker (more on that later).

Getting it all up
Setting up the SoundTouch 20 is a little more involved than Bose would have you believe. You need to hook up the speaker with your PC or Mac to configure your wireless network settings and a SoundTouch account that’ll store your settings and preferences so that no matter which device you access your SoundTouch from, the settings and preferences will be common. If you’re planning on streaming your iTunes library, you’ll obviously need to set up the SoundTouch Windows/Mac app on that same machine.

Tying the interface to the SoundTouch 20 is a set of Bose apps, available for PC/Mac, iOS and Android. The apps by themselves are elegant and intuitive to use, and feature six presets that correspond to – yep, you guessed right – the six numbered keys on top of your SoundTouch. You can drag specific songs, whole albums or artists, not to mention a wide selection of curated Internet radio channels, onto each preset for literally one-touch access. A preset works much like the presets you find on your car audio system: once you set it up, getting to your music is as easy as hitting that one button, nothing else. The idea is that the moment you reach home, you press one of the six buttons and the system wakes up from standby and starts belting out your favourite tunes. No more fiddling around with playlists on your phone, connecting to the speaker and other such mundane stuff when all you want to do is just listen to your music.

Sinking into the sound
With the music sources setup, the device streamed local playlists and Internet audio without any stutter, and there’s only the slightest delay in playback when you’re skipping through the catalogue. Sonically, the SoundTouch 20 is extremely capable at filling a moderately sized room and then some, with no discernable distortion even at the rather deafening top end. The warmth and quality of the audio it pumps out belies the size of the speaker, though we have to add the disclaimer that a lot depends on what kind of music you throw at it. In general, vocals are smooth, bass is full and the treble mostly within control (though it did get tinny on some tracks). As with all speakers, we’d recommend a trip the Bose Store armed with your favourite tracks before you plonk that cash down.

Be warned though – you may end up picking up more than one SoundTouch device… a no-brainer really, since the real power of the range is in its multi-room capabilities. If you have multiple SoundTouch devices throughout your home, you can control up to four devices through the app. You can then play different presets in different rooms or merge them all together to play the same music in all rooms, all the while controlling the volume of the entire console or independent SoundTouch speakers. Interestingly, Bose is kitting out its entire range to be SoundTouch enabled. What that means is that over the next year, everything from the company's TV soundbars to the tried-and-tested Wave desktop radio will be SoundTouch compatible, letting customers integrate their gear into a whole-house system.

A few chinks in the armour
There is one massive hurdle between Bose and your money – the present selection of Internet streaming services available to Indian consumers is rather paltry. Sure, each of the SoundTouch series is AirPlay compatible, so you can stream music directly off your iOS device, but beyond that, native access to local services like Saavn is simply missing. As is support for playing off music stored on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) within your home network, though it is due to be added later this year. Some more niggles – no support for lossless audio (only MP3/AAC/WMA) – which limits the quality of music that can be streamed to the SoundTouch speakers. Plus, you can’t split a pair of speakers into separate left and right channels for true stereo separation. And while each individual SoundTouch speaker has auxiliary input, you can’t stream that input into any other SoundTouch equipment, which means that your vinyl collection will have to play off just that one SoundTouch speaker in the room instead of a glorious multi-room experience.

We’d love to recommend the SoundTouch 20, we really would. But it would far more prudent to hold off from the purchase until Bose adds a more compelling suite of compatible services in the coming months.